One can certainly tend towards the hyperbolic when dealing with the current state of our politics. The opponent in this election (as well as 2016 and 2020) could be described in multiple ways and none of them have any connection to actual reality. Some would describe him as a cartoon villain. Others might describe him as the real life adult Eric Cartman. In the past, I have described him as a Bond villain post-traumatic brain injury. These are all funny in their own way, but for some they don’t carry much weight.

So, let me describe something that is concrete and potentially disastrous for our country. The current iteration of the GOP has no platform and no real ideology. It basically has become “whatever that guy says it is.” Ideology has to govern your party. Right or wrong, your party has to have a common framework and conception of how the world works. The other side might and likely will poke holes in that framework, but it gives you a baseline for decision making and core values.

I am only 50 years old. Many in our audience here have me by a decade or two. So, this seems weird for me to say, but I remember a time when Russia was the enemy. I remember a time when the worst thing the GOP could hang on you was either the communist label or to be painted as a Russian sympathizer. Instead of holding any candidate to that standard, the party has shifted based on a cult of personality and the fact that their standard bearer has a weird dictator fetish.

That is assuming the very best of the situation. The alternative is that their standard bearer is either under control for financial/blackmail reasons or is unwittingly under their control. I’d like to believe that his followers are blindly following him over this cliff, but we can’t rule out the possibility that some or all are paid stooges as well. I could point to numerous examples within the right wing media, but doing so would be giving attention to people that desperately crave it.

One recent example saw Vladimir Putin apparently advertising for disaffected conservatives and mouth breathers to move to Russia to get away from western liberalism. Indeed. We know a few things. We know that Russia interfered with our election in at least 2016 if not 2020 as well. We know they have spied on us. We know that our last president sided with Putin when it came to all of this information over his intelligence agencies and we know he shared confidential and top secret information with their bureaucrats.

We also know that Russia invaded a sovereign country unprovoked. Yet. voices on the right in government and commenting outside of it that have openly asked what is wrong with that. They have questioned whether we should be involved at all with even a few suggesting we should support Russia. Maybe we need a replay of cold war era movies where Russia is cast as the enemy. Maybe millions of Americans need to be reminded that dictators are not our friends. Maybe it just doesn’t matter anymore and we just need this spell to be broken. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills and I know I’m not the only one.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” — Howard Beale

Beale is a fictional character. He was an anchorman in the movie “Network”. In the movie. Beale asks all of the viewers to open their windows and shout out the above refrain at the same time. Referencing a fictional character and a fruitless gesture seems oddly apropos in the moment. Naturally, you are just going to have to take my word for it.

 

What you are looking at above is the media bias chart we teach our students. See, most people naturally just assume that media sources should only be measured by where they are on a left-right scale. The more important axis is percentage of factual content provided on these programs. The lower you are on the chart, the fewer facts that get dispensed on your network.

I’m sure you noticed that the left and right axis is pretty balanced on both sides. There are more right wing sources than left wing sources when you absolutely count them out, but it’s close enough not to make a difference. It is the factual axis that is most revealing. You’ll notice all but two left to center stay above the line that denotes selective or incomplete story information. Quite a few right leaning sources fall below that. In other words, it’s not symmetrical. Both sides do not do the same thing.

We set this in the backdrop of the latest right wing hysteria piece about DirecTV dropping Newsmax from it’s channel list. The right wing noise machine has called this censorship. Sure. If anyone leaning right accidentally stumbles onto this space I want you to listen very carefully. Censorship happens when the government stifles your ability to speak. It is not happening if your boss fires you for saying something offensive. It is not happening if a social media site blocks your commentary or decides to ban you from their site. For the love of God, it is not happening when a cable company decides not to carry your channel.

If you look carefully you can find Newsmax on the site above. It exists on the far right hand wing on the chart and is one of the least accurate. It comes somewhere between OANN and Fox News. That is terrific company. Since most commentators can’t be bothered to explain this nuanced point, I will make an attempt in case you are conservative and stumbled into this space.

All media outlets are biased in some sense. There are two kinds of bias. The first kind of bias reflects the editorial judgment of the outlet. What stories do they pump up? What stories do they bury? On this level, everyone in the mainstream media deserves all of the criticism that gets hurled their way. We amp up conflict. We amp up controversy. We amp up whatever sensationalism we can for eyeballs, clicks, and advertising dollars.

The second level of bias is the kind of bias most people think of. Are you actually telling the truth? You can see the chart above as easily as I can. There simply is no equivalency here. The notion that both sides do it is not only wrong, but it is inherently dangerous. I suppose that when someone exaggerates the importance of an issue then we can consider it a form of lying. That of course depends on how cynical you want to be.

However, take a look at your chart. MSNBC and CNN are reliable sources. They exercise a ton editorial discretion in what they choose to focus on, but they generally report facts. OANN, Newsmax, and Fox News do not. I don’t subscribe to DirecTV. They can allow any channel they want and they can cut any channel they want. It’s called capitalism. Maybe conservatives can give it a try.

There are two things that always get me when watching movies or reading books about the future. Of course, the comical thing is when they get things all wrong. “Back to the Future” told us of a turbulent time when cars flew, kids rode hover boards, and holograms were everywhere. Extremely weird stuff happened. Stuff like the Cubs winning the World Series. Well, that actually turned out to be true, but the other stuff was pure fantasy.

However, nothing quite compares when the crazy stuff predicted in stories of the past actually turns out to be eerily true. “1984” was meant to be a cautionary tale even back then. It chronicled the dangers of propaganda when the government became all powerful and no one was quite sure what was up and what was down.

A lie is still a lie even if it is repeated often. Yet, a lie is more easily believed the more often it is repeated. It seems that Donald Trump and the GOP are bound and determined to get you to believe whatever they would like you to believe on Hunter Biden. They are going to keep pushing that same story about the laptop until you finally believe it.

Of course, the fact that Hunter Biden had a laptop isn’t the lie. The fact that Biden has made deals where he has taken advantage of his father’s position is also not a lie. The idea that either of these two facts point to Biden as being the most corrupt president ever is the lie. The idea is not only false, but is laughable on its face.

Are Hunter Biden’s dealings problematic? I’m sure they are on some level. Nearly every president has had a brother, son, or wayward cousin they wish they could put a muzzle on and keep locked away for their own protection. Billy Carter and Roger Clinton were absolute embarrassments. Heck, George W. Bush was that embarrassment before he cleaned his act up. You’d have to settle for Neil Bush as the black sheep of that family.

Go back far enough and there is a stupid relative or friend that a president wish they didn’t have. Of course, depending on the president, these idiots either provided for temporary humiliation or were much more problematic. Of course, like in the case of Warren Harding, those scandals were much more about their own reaction than what their idiot relatives or friends did.

So, how is this situation any different? Well, on the first note, the people leveling the charge are so guilty it is not even funny. To accuse Hunter Biden of excessively profiting from the presidency or making shady deals is galling when compared to their own behavior. Heck, you could break it down by child and all of them made more combined than all presidential children in history. Ivanka and Jared Kushner probably did more than the others.

Even now, there are propagandists on Twitter trying to convince you that he and his children divested while Hunter Biden profited. Actual facts say otherwise. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth for millions of people. Joseph Goebbels told us how the big lie works. “1984” told us too. Seeing Back to Future’s version of 2015 was hilarious enough. Seeing “1984” actually come to life is anything but hilarious.

When we went to the D Day Museum in New Orleans, we noticed an entire room dedicated to the propaganda of the time period. There was one particular pamphlet that told us how to tell the difference between our “Japanese enemies and our Chinese friends.” One could easily imagine the government printing out the same pamphlet five years after World War II ended and simply switching the two.

Two things characterize the propaganda of the past. When we are separated from it for several decades it becomes so much easier to see the outrageous nature of it. How could anyone have put any stock in any of it? Of course, we have to acknowledge how effective it was at the same time. Propaganda plays on our fears and our prejudices. That is the unfortunate second thing that characterizes the propaganda.

Maria Baritromo is just the latest to get clipped for trying her hand at propaganda. We can go any number of directions in this deal, but the hilarious point here is the use of the colloquial “people are saying.” In this case she used the journalistic equivalent of “people are telling me.” Sure. It was a trick that her former leader tried throughout his presidency.

One wonders what happens to anyone when they are subjected to a barrage of crap like that. Maybe Baritromo is a prime example. Maybe someone who’s claim to fame was a dress she wore to the Al Smith dinner in 2016 couldn’t be expected to keep an air of objectivity. Perhaps that’s just a cheap shot on my account. The folks at Fox have never been anywhere close to objective. She wouldn’t be the first or the last “journalist” to be sold based on sex appeal and not actual intelligence.

It’s also one of those things that makes you wonder what the toll is on all of us when propaganda gets tossed around. The good folks on Twitter refer to it as getting ratioed. For those that don’t frequent Twitter, the term “ratioed” refers to when someone’s tweet attracts trolls and detractors in full force. Sometimes it is deserved, but it makes you wonder what the effect is on average ordinary folks.

Well, the average person can’t help but get sucked into all of it. One cannot watch something like Fox Business without having an extreme visceral reaction. Either you find yourself agreeing with the nonsense or you find yourself getting more angry at the nonsense. It creates a two-tiered con on the public. The base level con is that we believe Baritromo when she reports that “people are saying.”

The second level of the con is to get you riled up at the ridiculousness of it. It is here that we probably should mind the Yoda lesson of how anger and fear lead to the dark side. It creates separation where there was not separation before. It throws a wedge in between ordinary folks. It creates the “how could you think that…” dynamic.

From there, it is easy enough to separate people into their separate information silos. You can almost picture folks at Fox and MSNBC meeting together for a power lunch and toast to each other’s efforts. It serves both of them and their profits. You just wonder which one is covering the bill today.

OK, folks, it is seriously way past time to STOP airing Trump’s “briefings” on the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe.  During today’s briefing episode of The Apprentice, WH Edition, Trump actually aired a video that is nothing more than a North Korean style Dear Leader propaganda video that took snippets of actual news reports way out of context to make him look good.  Real networks immediately cut from their coverage, accurately reporting what Trump was doing.  The worst part was him standing to the side of the stage gloating and mugging for the cameras as the bullshit spewed from the WH video system.  We are WAY past time for the 25th Amendment.

 

 

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.